Much of my work as a kindergarten teacher was teaching young children how to be students. Even the routine for “circle time” on the carpet required days, if not weeks, of explicit practice. Making eye contact, waiting one’s turn to speak, and ignoring distractions are skills so basic that it’s easy to forget that they don’t come naturally to many kids. One or two of my students might know the carpet time routine on the first day of school, but just about everyone else needed to be taught.
These skills are also the prerequisite for mastering academic content because students won’t learn much from lessons they can’t attend to. Yet as they march through the K–12 grades, less and less time is devoted to study skills. Instead, content becomes the focus of the school day. A new book by a distinguished education psychologist seeks to close the learning skills gap for older students.
Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make it Easy, by Daniel T. Willingham, functions as part study guide, part self-help book. Willingham, a Harvard-trained professor of psychology who teaches at the University of Virginia, wrote it for rising college students “as a user’s guide to your brain that will allow you to fully exploit its learning potential.” A potential, it seems, that most current undergraduates are not fulfilling.
Willingham notes that, by their mid-teens, students are assumed to have become “independent learners.” While high school instructors are responsible for teaching content, the students themselves are left to manage the more mundane aspects of their learning. Few algebra instructors will use a class period to teach students how to take notes, manage their study time at home, or prepare for an exam.
But Willingham finds that many undergraduate students haven’t ever acquired the skills necessary to be independent learners, and therefore struggle to master the advanced content in college lectures and seminars. He sets out to remedy this problem by translating research on memory into practical advice. The book’s fourteen chapters include “How to Understand a Lecture,” “How to Take Tests,” and “How to Plan Your Work.” These chapters are further divided into ninety-four specific strategies, such as “Prepare a Study Guide” and “Be There and Engage.”
Some of Willingham’s tips are insightful, such as the ones pointing out the drawbacks of using a laptop or tablet to take notes. Wi-Fi-enabled devices provide too many distractions, so he favors old-fashioned pen and paper. His advice on how to properly ask questions of college professors is also helpful (briefly explain what you understand from the material, then identify what you don’t; don’t monologue just to show off what you know). His methods for using a calendar would be useful to most professional adults (“have your calendar with you at all times”; “write commitments in your calendar immediately”).
Yet many of the tips are so fundamental that one might assume students would need them to be admitted into college in the first place. How do teenagers bound for higher education graduate from high school without knowing how to take notes on a lecture (the subject of chapter two)? Or how to study for an exam (chapter six)? And, perhaps most concerning of all, did these students not read difficult books in high school (chapter five)? That college freshmen, including those at prestigious UVa, would need this kind of remedial advice speaks ill of their college preparedness.
It’s significant that Willingham did not write Outsmart Your Brain in response to the pandemic. There’s little doubt that school shutdowns, quarantines, and remote learning made students’ lack of study skills worse, but the problem predates those disruptions. An anecdote from his introduction to the book gives us insight into the true origin of the problem.
Some time ago, Willingham was invited to deliver a lecture on learning to five hundred teachers. He dreaded the engagement, convinced that he had nothing interesting to present. To his surprise, the lecture was a success. “Teachers didn’t know the content, even though it covered material you’d take in your very first course on learning,” he writes. The material in question came from an introductory course Willingham had been teaching to sophomores.
This should be a wake-up call for K–12 educators, particularly those in middle and high school. Teaching students how to be students shouldn’t stop in kindergarten. As academic content becomes more complex, so do the skills necessary to master it. And the most effective way to have students master those skills is to explicitly teach them. This will probably require abandoning pedagogies that promote “multiple intelligences” and “student centeredness” and focusing on objective, research-based practices like those in Willingham’s book. What he finds himself teaching at the collegiate level should be taught in much earlier grades.
No reasonable person expects all students to attend college, but those who do shouldn’t need most of the material in Outsmart Your Brain.
SOURCE: Daniel T. Willingham, Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make it Easy (Simon & Schuster, 2023).
